The Importance of Rotating Food Families on Your Health

Do you eat the same foods often, have food allergies/sensitivities, or want to eat more healthily? Understanding food families and rotating them is an important part of improving one’s diet. I didn’t fully understand why this was necessary until I discovered I had a multitude of food allergies/sensitivities.

A year ago, I was eating salads with fresh spinach and greens almost every day for lunch. Healthy right? Little did I realize at the time that eating the same foods too often was causing hidden inflammation in my body, food sensitivities, skin rashes, and internal bodily damage.

By eating the same foods too often, I was limiting my nutritional intake, even though the foods were considered healthy. My body became sensitized to the foods, which happens often when foods are eaten too frequently, and hidden damage occurred, mainly through the inflammation that resulted. (Spinach became a very unhealthy part of my diet.)

Inflammation is the basis for most Western diseases, such as heart disease, diabetes, obesity, cancer, and many more, so it is ever more important to reduce the inflammatory factors in one’s diet to reduce the chances of getting these diseases.

After getting officially diagnosed as having many food allergies (some I already realized on my own, some others I suspected, but most I never would have guessed), my doctor gave me a four-day rotational diet plan, which means that I’m not supposed to eat the same foods within a four-day period, except for the first 24-hour period. Also, I can’t eat foods within the same food family two days in a row. I need to skip one day between them.

For example, on day one, I can eat blueberries. (For me a day typically starts at dinner and runs through lunch the next day.) However, I can’t eat them again until day five. I can eat cranberries, which are in the same family as blueberries, on day three but not again until day eight.

I’m not suggesting that most people should follow this schedule. It’s only what my doctor prescribed for me. However, this article is meant to suggest that becoming more mindful of food family choices on any given day can help improve one’s health.

An example food rotation chart is below. The most important concept here is that I want people to be aware of the foods in a particular food family. Food family names are in yellow in the left-hand column. The list of foods in the family are underneath that, assuming more than one food is in the family.